Tag Archives: ACER report

The numerical details of Oxford University’s animal research in 2017 have now been made public. Here is a selection, showing the numbers for each species (with 2016 for comparison), and then the severity of the ‘procedures’ involved. A few comments follow the two tables.

Total number of experimental procedures, by species:

Species

Number in 2017

Number in 2016

Mice

229,640

200,157

Fishes

3,852

14,737

Rats

2,599

2,174

Junglefowl

21

291

Frogs

155

226

Guinea Pigs

80

81

Badgers

39

60

Pigs

5

0

Ferrets

29

29

Non-Human Primates

7

8

Rabbits

2

2

Total:

236,429

217,765

Severity of procedures by species (where moderate or above was recorded):

Species

Severe

Moderate

Mild

Sub-threshold

Non-recovery

Mice

2,085

38,177

65,063

121,487

2,828

Fishes

100

950

2,246

9,890

19

Rats

17

787

403

772

620

Ferrets

0

19

0

0

10

Non-Human Primates

0

7

0

0

2

The total number: 236,429 represents a rise of 8.5% over the previous year. It’s the largest number of research procedures recorded at the University since the new laboratory was opened in 2007, a year for which the number was 155,901. Almost certainly it’s the largest ever recorded at Oxford under the vivisection law of 1986, but numbers before 2007 aren’t obtainable.

Openness: Although the numbers are quite candidly published on the University’s web-site (as required by the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research, to which the University is a signatory), they are not exactly out in the open. They appear suddenly far down in the middle of the University’s standard account, ‘Research using animals: an overview’, itself a sub-division of the introductory page, ‘Animal Research’. By that point, the diligent reader will have been softened up with no less than three appearances of some variant of the statement “There is overwhelming scientific consensus worldwide that some research using animals is still essential for medical progress.” The idea, I suppose, is that he or she will be well prepared to regard the numbers, when they come, as the essential minimum.

Up or down: Accordingly there is no comment on the high-point which this year’s numbers represent, or indeed any comparison with any other year (VERO has added the comparison with 2016). On the contrary, the extended vindication of animal research in which they’re embedded includes the bewildering statement, “New techniques have dramatically reduced the number of animals needed – the number has almost halved over the last 30 years.” As I say, we don’t have Oxford University’s numbers before 2007, but in Great Britain as a whole, the number in 1987 was about 3.6 million. This number, so far from being “almost halved” since then, has in fact been exceeded in every year since 2010 (the number for 2016 was 3.94 million). But just in case we should interpret this rash assertion as conciliatory in spirit, it’s followed in the same sentence with yet a fourth appearance of the familiar refrain: “… but there is overwhelming scientific consensus worldwide that some research using animals is still essential for medical progress.”

Animals killed without experiments: There’s one valuable innovation this year: a number is provided for the animals bred and killed without being used in ‘procedures’. It’s a number which the Home Office doesn’t ask research institutions for, but ought to. Oxford’s total for the mice, rats, frogs, and zebrafishes which are bred in the University’s laboratories was 35,777.

Non-compliance and the 3Rs: The previous post in this blog was about the policing of the 1986 Act, and the 45 instances of non-compliance in 2016. Two of those instances took place in Oxford’s laboratories. This we learn from the annual report of the University’s Animal Care and Ethical Review Committee (published at the end of 2017), but not in enough detail to know which two they were. The report is a very general summary of the University’s ethical control of animal research, in particular its promotion of the 3Rs (replacement, reduction, refinement). The numbers given above don’t seem a very apt illustration of this activity, sincere as I’m sure it is. But then neither the ACER report, nor even the annual numbers, provide much insight into the attitudes, practices, or animal experiences which really characterize the laboratory scene at Oxford. Everything published about it is PR or PR-minded; the thing itself remains, for outsiders, hard or impossible to see.

Severity: As to the figures for ‘severity’ given above, and what these imply, see Note 4 in last year’s equivalent of this post here: https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/for-we-are-many/ In fact all of that post, and the previous year’s too (24 April 2016), remain disappointingly up to date. Very little has changed in the world of laboratory animals, least of all the commitment of Oxford University practitioners to its continuation. As ever, then, the rhesus macaque monkey looks out through the glass darkly, as we likewise look in.